Wednesday, 9 January 2019

WHY WE PUT THINGS IN BOXES

“Are you
ready to talk about that yet?”

The inspiration for this post came when I was speaking with my Community
Psychiatric Nurse. A little while ago she asked me for a list of the things in
my life that have had an impact on my mental health. I listed things like the
hallucinations, when I was bullied in High School… and the death of my cat;
Dolly. We’re using each appointment to go through the list by discussing one
thing at a time and at each appointment I’m asked if I’m ready to talk about
Dolly yet! At yesterday’s appointment I had a realization; I wasn’t reluctant
to talk about Dolly because I was worried that doing so would make me unsafe (that
it would trigger thoughts of self-harm etc). I didn’t want to talk about the
loss because I didn’t want to cause myself the upset. I wasn’t afraid of what
that upset might cause; I was just reluctant to face the grief and sadness.

And with every difficult topic comes a brand-new brain box.

That is to say that when a challenging topic comes to light in
your life, your brain can create a box for it and sometimes you can make a conscious
decision not to put it in there and sometimes your subconscious just says ‘no
way; we can’t deal with that right now!’ and happily puts the lid down on the
subject. A number of topics fall into this dilemma; from death to suicide, to
relationship break-ups to weight. Out-of-bounds subjects are different for everyone;
we’re not all comfortable talking about the same thing. Interestingly though, we
all have a lot of reasons for our boxing in common:

Shame

Probably common feeling amongst abuse survivors is shame. It will
never make sense to me that the survivor must overcome so many negative
emotions when the perpetrator of the abuse can - seemingly – walk around without
a care in the world but this is the reality of abuse. Shame comes in the form of
a fear of judgement. There’s often a lot of worry around people who hear of the
abuse making assumptions that you’re the one who’s to blame. Abuse survivors
are often told by their abusers that they ‘asked for it;’ that they had
deserved it; and the media doesn’t help in its regular barrage of headlines
about short skirts, drunken nights, and a willingness to walk down dark
alleyways. My shame came in the form of feeling dirty and I would shower at
least once a day. Abuse leaves a person feeling used; like they were only good
for that one thing and were completely useless and absolute failures when it
came to everything else in life. Then these feelings of inadequacy become
shameful.

Fear

The fear of all of these overwhelming emotions hitting you when
you open up about a difficult subject can be around the physical consequences
of it e.g. any legal aspects or about the concern of how you’ll cope with the emotions
– something that can be all the more dangerous for someone who has previously
self-harmed or made a suicide attempt. Wanting to avoid negative emotions has
to be a completely ‘normal’ human response; it’s natural to want to avoid
negativity – when it’s possible - no matter what it is. Why would anyone
voluntarily bring such emotions into their life? It’s like people talk about
how those with depression should just ‘pull themselves together’ – if it were
that easy… But it isn’t just about a fear of emotions and practical consequences;
it’s also about fearing another person’s reaction to your boxed issue. I mean,
I was always afraid of whether I’d be believed if I reported the abuse; which
meant that once a person was told, they’d have to choose a side. Did they
believe my brutal honesty or his arrogant denial?

Taking two – almost three – years to tell someone about the abuse
meant that going into recovery, I learnt that putting things in boxes could be
dangerously detrimental to your mental health. But this didn’t mean that I don’t
use them (brain boxes) anymore; as you saw from the beginning when I talked
about Dolly. I think it’s taught me to use them more wisely and safely though.
And I thought this post important to illustrate that you aren’t alone in boxing
up your issues.